When the New York Times
announced in an editorial on March 7, 1930, that it would
capitalize the word Negro thereafter, there were loud
hosannahs from the Aframerican intelligentsia, for (with an exception
to be noted) they seemed to be convinced that lifting the word out of
lower case would also give a leg up to its bearers. The decision of
the Times was inspired, according to its own account, by Major
Robert Russa Moton, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, but he was
by no means the originator of the movement, nor was the Times
the first American newspaper to yield. The true pioneer seems to have
been Lester Aglar Watson, a colored journalist hailing from St.
Louis, who, after a varied career on both Negro and white newspapers,
was made minister to Liberia in 1935. "In 1913," he says of himself
in Who's Who in America, "with cooperation of Associated
Press, started movement for capitalization of N in
Negro." He does not give the name of the first newspaper to be
fetched, but by the time the Times succumbed there were
already some important ones in his corral--among them, the New York
World, Herald Tribune and Telegram, the Chicago
Herald-Examiner (Hearst), the Christian Science Monitor
of Boston, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, and the
Brooklyn Eagle. Moreover, he had made some converts in the
South, even in the Deep South--for example, the Montgomery (Ala.)
Advertiser (then edited by the late Grover Hall), the Durham
(N.C.) Sun, and the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger. Yet more, he
had persuaded a number of national magazines, including the
Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Republic,
the American Mercury, and Time. Finally, he had rounded
up several government agencies--for example, the Census Bureau, the
Bureau of Education and the whole Department of Commerce. But the
surrender of the Times was hailed as a crucial victory in the
long war, and when it was followed three years later by that of the
Style Manual of the Government Printing Office, which sets the style
for the Congressional Record and is generally followed by
other government publications, there was a renewal of the rejoicing.

The one dissentient was George S. Schuyler, columnist since 1924
for the Pittsburgh Courier, contributor to many white
magazines, author of "Black-No-More," father of the
Wunderkind, Philippa Schuyler, and the best Negro journalist,
and by long odds, ever heard of. On March 15, 1930, only a week after
the Times had come into camp, he broke out in the
Courier with the following:

It really doesn't matter a tinker's damn whether Negro is
spelled with a small or large N, so far as the Negro's
economic, political and cultural status is concerned. The gabble,
mostly senseless, to the contrary has vastly amused me; for, if
anything, it is worse to spell Negro with a large N
than with a small one, and if I had my way I would discontinue
it....

The truth is that the American Negro is an amalgam of
Caucasian, Amerindian and African, there being but 20 per cent
"pure," and those are the only ones entitled to the term
Negro when used as a descriptive adjective. Geographically,
we are neither Ethiopians or Africans, but Americans. Culturally,
we are Anglo-Saxons.

Used as a noun, the term is therefore a designation of a
definite social caste, an under-dog, semi-serf class which
believes it is dignifying its status by a capitalization of the
term by which it is called and recognized. This is the same thing
as arguing that an imbecile is somewhat ennobled by spelling the
word with a capital I or that a convict has his status
improved by spelling the word with a capital C. Lifting
Negro from the lower case to the upper typographically does
not in the least elevate him socially. As a matter of fact, it
fits right in with the program of racial segregation. As
negroes we are about 3,000,000 strong, as Negroes we
are 12,000,000 strong; as negroes we are a definite
physical type, as Negroes we are a definite social class.
It is significant that Southern newspapers and magazines were more
ready and willing to make the change in Negro than the
Northern publications. The former are ever eager to make the Negro
satisfied with his place; the latter based their objections on
etymological and grammatical grounds....

The possession of physical characteristics or ancestry
different from other people by any citizen should not be
constantly emphasized and brought to the attention of newspaper
readers, especially in this country. The interests of interracial
peace demand the abolition of such references and we ought to
fight for that and lose no time trying to get white folks to
"dignify" a socio-chromatic caste system established and
maintained by them for their own convenience and economic
advantage. There is something ridiculous about a so-called
Negro bellowing against color discrimination and
segregation while wearing out his larynx whining for a
glorification of his Jim Crow status in society through
capitalization of the N in Negro.

Mr. Schuyler returned to the subject many times afterward. Thus on
July 17, 1937:

Negro clearly belongs with blonde, brunette, ruddy, mulatto,
octoroon and such descriptive terms, and has no stronger claim
on capitalization.... Capitalized, it tends to bolster the
status quo, and thus is at best conservative and at worst
reactionary, for it discourages differentiation and strengthens
the superstition that "all coons are alike."

And again on March 20, 1943:

Negro is either an adjective meaning black or it is a caste
name like Sudra. When we eagerly accept it as a group
designation, regardless of our skin tint, we are accepting all the
"racial" nonsense of Hitler, Bilbo, and the myriads who believe as
they do--at least in the day time.

But Mr. Schuyler's iconoclastic position got no support from the
general run of American colored folk, nor from their accepted
fuglemen and haruspices. Even so generally non-conforming a spokesman
of the race as the late Dr. Kelly Miller was moved, in 1937, to argue
for Negro in Opportunity, the organ of the National
Urban League:1

A printed list consisting of Englishmen, Germans, Italians, Jews
and negroes would evidently be a case of unexplained
typographical discrimination. If it be said that Negro is
not derived from a country or geographical division, as other
racial designations are, an adequate rejoinder would be that
neither is Jew.2

In the first days of slavery, Dr. Miller said, the slaves were
called simply blacks, and even after interbreeding lightened
their color the term continued in use "in a generic sense." Then came
African, which "was accepted by the race in the early years,
after it first came to self-consciousness, "and still survives in the
titles of some of its religious organizations, e.g., the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. (This according to
the Dictionary of American English, was during the first half
of the Eighteenth Century.) A bit later darky or darkey
began to be used, and "at first it carried no invidious implication."
(The DAE's first example is dated 1775.) Then came
Africo-American (1835 or thereabout), but it was too clumsy to
be adopted.3 After the Civil War
freedman was in wide use, but it began to die out before the
end of the 70's.4 In 1880 Afro-American
was invented by T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York
Age, and it still survives, but only in rather formal
usage.5 "Mr. Fortune," said Dr.
Miller, "repudiated the word Negro because of the historical
degradation and humiliation attached to it." At some undetermined
time after 1900 Sir Harry Johnston, the English African explorer and
colonial administrator, shortened Afro-American to
Aframerican, but the latter has had but little
vogue.6 After rehearsing, in his
article, the history of all these appellations, Dr. Miller turned to
Negro and colored, and proceeded to discuss their
respective claims to general adoption. The latter, he concluded,
could not qualify, for it was properly applicable to any person not
white, including Chinese, Japanese, Indians and Mexicans, and had
been so applied in various State laws, and even, at least by
inference, in Federal population
statistics.7 Thus his reasoning:

Try, if you will, to express the idea involved in Negro
art, Negro music, Negro poetry, Negro genius,
the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Negro
Education and the Negro Handbook terms of the word
colored and see what a lamentable weakness would result from this
substitution.... The term Negro is far superior to the term
colored in grammatical inflection, for it may be used
either as a noun or as an adjective, whereas colored has no
nominal equivalent. Unlike the words black and
white, it does not pluralize into a noun.... The word
people, race or persons must be added to give
collective or plural effect.... This handicap is seen in the
possessive case. . . . Again, the word Negro may be easily
inflected into Negroid by adding the Greek ending
-oid, which implies likeness or resemblance to. This term
may be used either as a noun or an adjective, and forms an apt
designation of the derivatives of African blood now scattered
through the world.

Dr. Miller admitted that "such terms as colored lady, colored
gentleman and colored society" sounded "more polite than
the corresponding Negro equivalents," but argued that the preference
for them probably grew out of "that to which the ear is accustomed."
He went on:

Many of the off-colored group object to the term Negro
because it serves as a reminder of the humiliation and degradation
through which the race has passed. The fact that Negro is
now used to describe the group does not indicate any lesser degree
of appreciation or esteem.... Any race or group, in the long run,
will derive its reputation from its character and worth, and not
from the appellation by which it is known. . . . Sensitiveness
about a name is always a sign of the inferiority complex.

Dr. Miller, going further than most other advocates of
Negro, was also willing to accept Negress, which is
intolerably offensive to most high-toned colored folk. Here the
iconoclastic Schuyler agreed with him, saying,

If we accept the term Negro there is no sound reason for
spurning Negress, and yet its use is discouraged and
condemned without, of course, any sensible argument being advanced
for this position. I understand Jews are similarly unreasonable
about the term Jewess.8

But despite this agreement of two high Negro authorities, the
Atlantic Monthly got into hot water when, in October, 1935, it
used Negress in an editorial reference to a colored
contributor, Miss Juanita Harrison, author of a serial entitled "My
Great, Wide, Beautiful World." Moreover, it added to its offense by
speaking of the lady by her given name alone, without the
Miss.9 Protests came in promptly,
and one of them, from Isadore Cecilia Williams, of Washington, was
printed in the issue for December, along with an editorial
explanation. I take the following from Miss (or Mrs.?) Williams's
letter:

Negress. . . is obnoxious to Negroes chiefly because of the
sordid, loose, and often degrading connotations it has been forced
to carry. From the standpoint of etymology I believe I am right in
saying that the use of ess as a suffix to designate the women of
any race is practically obsolete. Out of courtesy to a race and a
sex I suggest that you hereafter discard the offensive term
Negress.

It was petty, to say the least, to refer to Miss Harrison as
Juanita in the editorial preface to her letters. Perhaps it
is mere class distinction, but class distinction should be beneath
the dignity of your pages. A witness in a recent kidnapping case,
though only a nursemaid, was referred to as Miss Betty Gow.
Certainly Miss Harrison, whose honesty you commend and whose
native intelligence merited a place in your pages, deserves at
least common courtesy at your hands.

To this the editor of the Atlantic replied somewhat lamely
that he "really did not know that the word Negress carried a
derogatory connotation." "I suppose," he went on, "that the feeling
must come from the analogy of the suffix -ess being used
throughout the animal kingdom." In further confession and avoidance
he cited the parallel terms, Jewess and Quakeress,
conveniently overlooking the fact (maybe also unknown to him) that
the former is vastly disliked by Jews. As to the use of her simple
given-name in referring to Miss Harrison he said:

In the correspondence regarding her which came from a former
employer she was continually referred to as Juanita, and it
was natural to transfer this designation to the Atlantic.
We certainly meant no disrespect, for as you surmise, we thought
her an honest, interesting and able character.

Other Negro publicists have proposed various substitutes for any
designation pointing directly to color, among them race and
group. According to Dr. Miller, racemen was suggested
in 1936 or thereabout by Robert L. Abbot, editor of the Chicago
Defender. Dr. Miller himself rejected it as equally applicable to
a white man or an Indian and predicted that it would "fall under the
weight of its own ineptness." It has, however, survived more or less,
and group is really flourishing. Many of the Negro newspapers
use our group, group man, group leader, etc. Some of them also
use such terms as brown-skinned and sepia to get away
from the forthright but usually inaccurate black, and in 1944
there was a Sepia Miss America contest operated by a committee
in Boston.10

At present the surviving objection to Negro, now
capitalized by nearly all American publications, takes two forms.
First, there is a campaign against using it whenever a person of
color comes into the news, on the ground that calling attention to
his race is gratuitous, and usually damaging to the other members of
it. Second, there is resentment of the unhappy fact that the word is
frequently mispronounced, and tends to slide into the hated
nigger. In the South it is commonly heard as
nigrah,11 and not only from white
lips. Indeed, nigrah is also used by Northern Negroes,
including some of the most eminent, as witness the following protest
from a reader of the Pittsburgh Courier.

A great many professional Negro orators, prominent speakers,
leaders and so on are speaking on the radio all over the
country--on forums, "March of Time" programs, etc. Nearly all make
the one big noticeable error of pronouncing Negro as if it
were spelled nigro or nigraph.... It is all the more
noticeable when white people are on the same program. They
pronounce Negro correctly, with the emphasis on ne
and not nig.12

Worse, even the abhorred nigger is in wide use among the
colored people themselves, especially on the lower levels. Said
Lucius Harper, managing editor of the Chicago Defender, in
1939:

It is a common expression among the ordinary Negroes and is used
frequently in conversation between them. It carries no odium or
sting when used by themselves, but they object keenly to whites
using it because it conveys the spirit of hate, discrimination and
prejudice.13

Nigger is so bitterly resented by the more elegant members
of the race that they object to it even in quotations, and not a few
of their papers spell it n----r when necessity forces them to
use it.14 On March 4, 1936, Garnet
C. Wilkinson, first assistant superintendent of schools of
Washington, in charge of the Negro public schools of the District of
Columbia, actually recommended to Superintendent F. W. Ballou that
Opportunity, for years a recognized leader among Negro
magazines, be barred from the schools of the District on the ground
that it used "the opprobrious term N------ in its publications
on Negro life." When news of this recommendation reached Elmer A.
Carter, the editor, he naturally protested, and under date of March
11 received the following from Dr. Wilkinson:

It is contrary to a long established administrative policy,
initiated and fostered by the school teachers and officers of
Divisions 10-13 of the public schools of the
District,15 to recommend to the
Board of Education the adoption of any textbook, basic or
supplementary, magazine, or periodical known to make use of the
term N----- in its publication.

Textbooks published by white authors and making use of such
material have been refused for adoption in our public schools.
Textbooks have been withdrawn from the approved list for the same
reason. Obviously, a textbook, magazine, or periodical published
by a Negro should be subject to the same administrative policy.
There can be no double standard of evaluating such school
materials--one standard for white authors, another standard for
Negro authors.

You are now advised that this office would be willing to
recommend the placing of Opportunity on the approved list
of magazines and periodicals for the public schools of the
District if you, as editor, will give us the assurance that
Opportunity will discontinue the policy of using any
opprobrious term or terms in referring to the Negro.

Mr. Carter replied to this curious communication under date of
March 17, as follows:

Even a casual examination of the magazine will reveal that your
recommendation has been based on a total misconception of the use
of the term nigger when it appears in Opportunity.
That use is limited to quotations from other writers or is the
reproduction in poem or story of the speech and conversation of
characters who commonly use this term, and in both cases the word
or the line in which it occurs is always set off by quotation
marks, italics, or other literary and printing insignia.

It should not be necessary for me to direct your attention to
the fact that there is a vast and obvious difference in the use of
a word or phrase in quotation and its use as a definitive term in
the editorial contents of a publication, nor to affirm that
Opportunity never employs any epithet of opprobrium in its
columns except under the limitations mentioned above.

If impartially applied, the ruling of the Board of Education
will achieve astonishing if not fantastic results. For by the same
standards the Nation, the New Republic,
Harper's,Time, the Literary Digest, the
Forum, in fact, almost every magazine which on occasion
publishes stories or articles involving the Negro, must likewise
be removed from the list of magazines approved for the children in
the Negro schools of Washington. By the same token the most
authoritative books on the Negroes' status in America must of
necessity fail of approval as suitable reading matter for Negro
children in the District of Columbia. For this incredible decision
would refuse approval to "The Souls of Black Folk" and "Black
Reconstruction," by DuBois; "The Black Worker, " by Harris;
"Shadow of the Plantation," by Johnston; the autobiography of
Frederick Douglass; "The Life and Works of Booker T. Washington,"
the novels of Walter White, Chesnutt and Dunbar, and the poetry of
Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, to mention only a
few.16

Nothing came of this effort to purge Opportunity of
nigger. I am told by Lester B. Granger, executive secretary of
the National Urban League, that it is still used whenever required by
"a faithful description of real life situations," though "where it
adds nothing to the context it is sometimes eliminated." The same
failure marked an effort to work up a boycott against Noxzema, a
lotion popular among Negroes as among whites, because the credit
manager of the manufacturing company had used the phrase nigger in
the woodpile in a dunning circular to slow-paying druggists. This
boycott was launched by an organization calling itself the National
Commission on Negro Work, affiliated with the International Workers
Order, and for a while a committee collected signatures to a paper
demanding that the company "apologize publicly," discharge the
offending credit manager, and "open job opportunities for Negroes in
your plant." Every signer was invited to make a contribution to "a
collection to defray costs of promotion only" and so deliver "a sock
at Hitlerism," but the company refused to be intimidated, and nothing
came of the boycott. Nor did any greater success attend an attack by
the same National Commission on the A. & P. stores for selling a
Niggerhead stovepolish. But a year before this the New York
Amsterdam News apparently had better luck with a crusade
against the American Tobacco Company for offering a Niggerhead
smoking-tobacco, for on March 20, 1943 the Nation
announced that the brand would be withdrawn. Nigger in the
woodpile is traced by the DAE to 1861, and is defined by
it as "a concealed or inconspicuous but highly important fact, factor
or catch in an account, proposal, etc." Of the six examples that it
gives, two are from the Congressional Record. Niggerhead, in
the more refined form of negrohead, is traced to 1833, and
defined as "a low grade of strong, dark-colored tobacco." It was used
by Huckleberry Finn in contradistinction to store-tobacco.
Niggerhead, in the sense of a piece of extraordinarily hard
rock, goes back to 1847, and has been used in a report of the
Smithsonian; it also appears in "Chicago Poems" by Carl Sandburg,
1916.

Negro is not, of course, an Americanism. It is simply the
Spanish and Portuguese word for "black," and was borrowed by the
English during the sixteenth century. By 1587 a Northern English
form, neger, had appeared, and it was from this that both the
Irish naygur and the English-American nigger were
derived. The New English Dictionary's first example of
nigger comes from a poem by Robert Burns, published in 1786.
In the United States, in the spelling of niger, the
Dictionary of American English traces it to Samuel Sewell's
diary, 1700. But after that the DAE offers no example until
the nineteenth century. Nigger-boy is traced to 1825,
nigger-wench to 1837, nigger-regiment to 1863,
nigger-talk to 1866 (nigger alone, meaning the manner
of speech of Negroes, goes back to 1825), niggerish to 1825,
nigger-killer to 1856, nigger-luck (meaning good luck)
to 1851, and nigger-heaven (the top gallery in a theatre) to
1878. Nigger-stealer, once a term of opprobrium comparable to
the isolationist of today, is not listed, and neither are
nigger-lover, nigger-job, nigger-mammy and nigger-gal.
There are many other derivatives. I have mentioned niggerhead
in the sense of a lump of hard rock, and in that of coarse chewing
and smoking tobacco. It is also used to designate the common
black-eyed Susan, a variety of greenbrier, and one of cactus. After
the Civil War it was used for a person in favor of full political
equality for Negroes. There are a nigger-duck, a
nigger-goose, a nigger-weed, and several kinds of
nigger-fish. To nigger off means to divide a log into
convenient lengths by burning through it, to nigger out means
to exhaust the soil by working it without fertilizer, and to
nigger it means to live meagrely. A nigger is a device
used in sawmills to turn a heavy log, and also a defect in an
electrical conductor, causing a short circuit. Niggertoe is a
dialect name, in rural New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, for a Brazil
nut, and was once used to designate a variety of potato. To work
like a nigger is traced by the DAE to 1836, and to let
off a little nigger to 1828. The use of niggerhead to
signify a hard stone was no doubt suggested by the old American
belief that the skull of the Negro is extraordinarily thick, and
hence able to stand shard blows without cracking. That superstition
is accompanied by one to the effect that the shins of the colored
folk are extremely tender. The notion that they have an inordinate
fondness for watermelon belongs to the same category. This last is so
far resented by high-toned Negroes that they commonly avoid
Cirtullus vulgaris in their diet as diligently as the more
elegant sort of German-Americans used to avoid Limburger
cheese.17

Before 1890, according to Dr. Miller, the Census Bureau "sought to
sub-divide the Negro group into blacks, mulattoes, quadroons
and octoroons," but found it "impossible to make such sharp
discriminations, since these divisions ran imperceptibly into one
another." It was upon the advice of Booker T. Washington that it
began calling all colored persons of African blood Negroes.
Mulatto, quadroon and octoroon have now almost disappeared
from American speech. Of them, only octoroon seems be an
Americanism. Mulatto, which comes from the Spanish and
Portuguese mulato, signifying a young mule, and hence a half
breed, is traced by the NED in English use to 1595.
Originally, the word meant the immediate offspring of a Negro and a
white person, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was
being applied to anyone of mixed white and Negro blood. In the early
chronicles and travel-books it was spelled in a dozen different ways,
some of them quite fantastic, e.g., malatta, melatto, muletto
and mulattoe. Quadroon is a loan from the quateron
of the Louisiana French, who borrowed it in turn from the Spanish
cuarterón. The NED's first example of quarteron
is dated 1707; Thomas Jefferson used it in that form in 1793. In
the form of quatroon it goes back to 1748 in English usage and
to 1808 in American, and in the form of quadroon to 1796 and
1832 respectively. Octoroon is apparently more recent. There
is no recorded trace of it before 1861, when Dion Boucicault used it
in the title of a play. Griffe, another loan from the French
of Louisiana, is now obsolete. It signified, according to Miss Grace
E. King, quoted by the DAE,18 a mixed breed one degree
lighter than an octoroon, the series being mulatto,
quadroon, octoroon, griffe.

The irreverent Schuyler, who does not hesitate to refer to the
members of his race, in his column in the Pittsburgh Courier,
as Senegambians, tar-brushed folk and so on, frequently
discusses the opprobrious names that have been applied to them,
e.g., darkey, coon, shine, smoke, woolly-head, dinge and
boogie, In 1936, when the Baltimore Afro-American
started a holy war against "My Old Kentucky Home" because darkey
occurs in it, and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People denounced the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin for using it in
a radio speech, he said:

Will some one who has the gift of logic and intelligence tell me
what is the difference between darkey and Negro?. .
. There can be no more real objection to darkey than there
can be to blondie. It is a far more acceptable term than
wop or kike. As my friend J. A.
Rogers19 once profoundly
remarked, the difference between Negro and nigger is
the difference between sir and sah. Granted that the
overwhelming majority of Negroes are opposed to the use of these
terms, I can see no point in constantly making a wailing protest
against their use.

Coon, though it is now one of the the most familiar
designations for a Negro, apparently did not come into general use in
that sense until the 80's; Thornton's first example is dated 1891 and
the DAE's 1887.20 For many years before
that time the term had been used in the sense of a loutish white man,
and in Henry Clay's day it had designated a member of the Whig party.
It came originally, of course, from the name of the animal,
Procyon lotor, which seems to have been borrowed from the
Algonquian early in the seventeenth century, and was shortened from
raccoon to coon before 1750. "How the Negro Got the
Name of Coon" is the title of one of the stories in a collection of
Maryland folk-lore published by Mrs. Walter R. Bullock, Jr., in
1898,21 but all it shows is that
the Negro who is the chief figure called himself a coon, and
that the name was afterward applied to others. Why he did so is not
explained, nor when. The popularity of the term seems to have got a
lift from the vast success of Ernest Hogan's song, "All Coons Look
Alike to Me," in 1896. Hogan, himself a colored man, used it without
opprobrious intent, and was amazed and crushed by the resentment it
aroused among his people. Says Edward B. Marks in They All
Sang:22

The refrain became a fighting phrase all over New York. Whistled
by a white man, it was construed as a personal insult. Rosamond
Johnson23 relates that he once
saw two men thrown off a ferry-boat in a row over the tune. Hogan
became an object of censure among all the Civil Service
intelligentsia, and died haunted by the awful crime he had
unwittingly committed against his race.

"All Coons Look Alike to Me" was followed in 1899 by "Every Race
Has a Flag But the Coon," by Heelan and Helf, two white men, and in
1900 by "Coon, Coon, Coon," by two others, Jefferson and Friedman,
and from that time forward coon was firmly established in the
American vocabulary.24 The history of the other
more or less opprobrious synonyms for Negro is mainly obscure. The
DAE does not list boogie and its congeners, but reports that
booger is an Americanism, traced to 1866, for a bogy. In 1891
a writer in Harper's Magazine,25 quoted by the DAE,
defined boogahhole as "the hiding place of cats and of
children fleeing from justice" and of boogars or
boogahs, "whatever these mysterious beings may be." It is
possible that the suggestion of darkness developed boogie from
booger or boogah. The latter form, however, hints at a
Southern variant of bogy or bogey, which has been
traced in England by the NED, in the sense of the devil, to
1836, in the sense of a goblin to 1857, and in that of a bugbear to
1865. In Baltimore, in my childhood, boogieman was one of the
names of the devil.

Buffalo as a designation for a Negro is not listed by the
DAE, but it gives the word as used to designate a North
Carolina Unionist during the Civil War; it has also been applied to
the people of seaboard North Carolina in general. From the early
eighteenth century down to 1880 or thereabout Cuffy was a
generic name for a Negro, comparable to Pat for an Irishman.
George Philip Krapp says in The English Language in
America26 that "it is said to be
derived from Dutch Koffi, in Guiana a common name for Negroes
and by custom applied to anyone born on Friday." The DAE calls
it "of African origin" and traces it to 1713. It had a rival in
Sambo, which apparently arose, not in the United States, but
in England. The DAE traces it to 1748 there and to 1806 here.
In my boyhood Cuffy had disappeared and Sambo was being
supplanted by Rastus.27 During the same era
Liza or Lize was the common name for a colored girl.
The DAE omits dinge and lists dinkey only in the
adjectival sense of small, trifling. Dinkey, in the Baltimore
of my nonage, meant a colored child. Webster's New
International, 1934, lists dinge, but omits dinkey
in the sense here considered. Kink shows an obvious
allusion to the Negro's hair; the DAE says that kinky,
as applied to it, is an Americanism, and traces it to 1844. When, in
1936, Cab Calloway, the Negro musician, used kinky-head in a
broadcast, he was violently belabored by the radio critic of one of
the Negro weeklies.28Woolly-head is
first found by the DAE in Cooper's The Prairie in 1827; it was
also used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Dred: a Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp in 1856. During the Civil War era the term was
applied, like buffalo, to Unionists.

Moke is traced by the DAE to 1856, but the word was
used in England before this in the sense of a donkey. An amateur
lexicographer calling himself Socrates Hyacinth, writing in
1869,29 sought to derive it "from
Icelandic mockvï, darkness," and called it "a word
chiefly in use among the Regulars stationed in Texas and in the
Territories." He added that it also had "Cymric affinities, and was
probably brought into currency by Welsh recruits who have
occasionally drifted into the Army from New York City." This
suggestion of a possible Welsh origin was supported by an anonymous
writer in the London Daily Mirror on November 28, 1938, who
said that the etymology "Which receives the greatest expert support
derives moke from the Welsh gipsy moxio or
moxia, a donkey." "Moxio," he continued, "existed some
fifty years before the first recorded instance, in 1848, of
moke. Moreover, about 1839 somebody of the name of Brandon
records moak as a cant word of gipsy origin, and, at that
time, mainly gipsy use." The NED calls moke "of unknown
origin," and Webster's New International marks it "origin
uncertain." Ernest Weekley, in his Etymological Dictionary of
Modern English,30 suggests that it is
"perhaps from some proper name (?Moggy) applied to the ass,"
and says that Mocke, Mok, Mog and Mug "all occur as
personal names in the thirteenth century and survive in the surnames
Mokes and Moxon." Moke was thrown into
competition with coon in 1899 by the success of "Smoky Mokes,"
a popular song by Holzmann and Lind, but is now heard only seldom.
Pickaninny, in the sense of a Negro child, is not an
Americanism. It was in use in England so long ago as 1657, whereas
the DAE's first American example is dated 1800. The English
prefer the spelling piccaninny; the word, in the past, was
variously spelled piccanini, pickoninnie, pick'ny, piccanin
and picannin. It appears to be derived from the Cuban Spanish
piquinini, meaning a small child, and it was taken into
English in the British West Indies. It is used in South Africa
precisely as we use it, but is commonly spelled piccanin. In
Australia it designates a child of the aborigines, and has there
produced a derivative, piccaninny-daylight, signifying
dawn.31 In the Baltimore of my
youth pickaninny was not used invidiously, but rather
affectionately. So, indeed, was tar-pot, also signifying a
Negro child.

The DAE does not list such vulgar synonyms for Negro
as ape, eight-ball, jazzbo, jigabo (with the variants,
jibagoo, jig, zigabo, zigaboo, zig), jit, seal, shine, skunk,
smoke, snowball, spade, squasho and Zulu. Crow is
traced to 1823, when it was used by Cooper in The Pioneers,
the first of the Leatherstocking tales. Whether it suggested Jim
Crow or was itself suggested by Jim Crow I do not know.
The DAE's first example of Jim Crow is dated 1838, but
that example includes the statement that "'Zip Coon' and 'Jim Crow'
are hymns of great antiquity." The DAE says, however, that
Thomas D. Rice's song and dance, "Jim Crow," was written in
1832.32 The verb phrase, to
jump Jim Crow, appeared a year later. By 1838 Jim Crow had
become an adjective and it was so used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852; of late it has also become a verb.
The DAE's first example of Jim Crow car is dated 1861;
of Jim Crow school, 1903; of Jim Crow bill, 1904; of
Jim Crow law, 1904, and of Jim Crow regulations, 1910.
On April 10, 1943, the Nation used Jap Crow in the
title of an article on the internment of the Japanese of the Pacific
Coast, but this Winchellism did not catch on. Eight-ball,
without doubt, is derived from the game of pool, which is played with
fifteen numbered and vari-colored balls, No. 8 being black. The
DAE lists blueskin as an early synonym for Negro. It
occurs, in Cooper's The Spy, 1821, but had become obsolete
before the Civil War. In Baltimore, in the 80's of the last century,
the German-speaking householders, when they had occasion to speak of
Negro servants in their presence, called them die blaue. In
the 70's die schwarze had been used, but it was believed that
the Negroes had fathomed it. In the Bronx, so I am informed by a
correspondent, the Jewish housekeepers use die gelbe, with
ein gelber in the singular. Without doubt gelbe has
failed of its purpose as miserably as blaue, for the colored
folk always penetrate the stratagems of the Caucasian, and chuckle
over them in a sad but amiable manner.

2.Here Dr. Miller slipped. The
New English Dictionary says that Jew was "originally a
Hebrew of the kingdom of Judah."

3.It survives, however, in the
name of the Africo-American Presbyterian, a weekly published
since 1879 by the Negro Presbyterian Church at Charlotte, N. C.

4.Many other terms, now
obsolete, were used in that era, e.g., the abbreviation
f.m.c. (free man of color). Carl Sandburg says in his
Abraham Lincoln: the War Years (New York, 1939), vol. II, p.
137; "Demurrings arose to Lincoln's progressions in styling the
Negroes, in 1859, negroes; in 1860, colored men; in
1861, intelligent contrabands; in 1862, free Americans of
African descent." Contraband came into use in 1861, when
General Benjamin F. Butler issued a proclamation declaring slaves
owned by Confederates contraband of war, but it was forgotten by
1870.

5.It is the name of a Negro
newspaper of wide circulation and influence, published in Baltimore
with local editions in other places. The readers of the paper in
Baltimore call it the Afro, and it so refers to itself. "It is
interesting to note," said Dr. Miller, "that the Africo-American
Presbyterian and the Afro-American, which stress their
names in heavy type at the head of their papers, rarely use these
terms in their news service or editorial columns."

6.It was preceded, and probably
suggested, by Amerindian, a name for the American Indian
coined by Major J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, in
1899. Amerindian was quickly displaced by Amerind,
which is still in use. In South Africa a similar quest for a sonorous
designation for themselves has been carried on by the natives. "Their
latest choice," said J. A. Rogers in Sex and Race (New York,
1941). p. 131, "is Eur-African." But this is objected to by
the whites, who say that they are the only real Eur-African.
The term Afrikander, which might well designate the blacks, is
already monopolized by the whites. In Liberia the descendants of
returned American slaves who constitute the ruling caste of the
country used to call themselves Americo-Liberians to
distinguish their group from the general mass of blacks. But I am
informed by Mr. Ben Hamilton, Jr., formerly of the Liberian consulate
in Los Angeles, that this compound is now out of favor. He says:
"Because of the great amount of intermarriage between the descendants
of colonists to Liberia from America with aborigines of the Negro
republic, and because of a wave of nationalism that is sweeping the
country, Liberians consider the term Americo-Liberian
opprobrious as reflecting upon their [ancestors'] condition of
servitude in the States. Hence they prefer to be called
civilized or Monrovian Liberians to distinguish them
from the natives of the hinterland, who are generally called by their
tribal names." Monrovia is the capital of Liberia, and the home of
virtually all its noblesse.

7.Mexicans were not formally
classified as white until the 1940 Census. Before that they were
lumped with "other races." Very few of them, of course, are actually
white, even in part. The change was made in furtherance of the Good
Neighbor policy.

9.Some of the Negro papers carry
their liking for this honorific so far that they apply it to lady
criminals. I take the following, for example, from the New York
Amsterdam News, Jan. 15, 1944, p. 8-B: "On the eve of her
trial for fatally bludgeoning another woman to death [sic] last
April, Beatrice Watson, 23, avoided a possible life term in prison
last week by pleading guilty to second degree manslaughter. As a
result Miss Watson will be faced with a penalty of not more than 15
years."

10."Miss America Contest Plans
Given to Public," by Paul Davis, New York Amsterdam News,
March 18, 1944, p. 6-A.

11.In The Field, the
Dungeon and the Escape, by Albert D. Richardson (Hartford, Conn.,
1865), p. 37, a Southern planter was made to use nig-roe. I
have heard niggero, but only in sportive use.

12.This protest appeared May
15, 1943, in ``Yes! we All Talk," a philological column conducted by
Marcus H. Boulware. Mr. Boulware, in a note appended to the letter,
said that "ne in Negro should rime with see, and
gro with grow."

14.For example, I find the
following on p. 1 of the Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 1, 1941, in
a dispatch from Due West, S.C., reporting the beating of a colored
pastor, the Rev. B. J. Glover, Jr., "because law officers of this
prejudice-ridden town thought he was too uppity for a N----r."
Here, it will be noted the offending word was given a capital
N. In the same dispatch occurred the following: "Another
officer said, Let's teach that D...N..... a lesson, and struck
Rev. Glover."

16.This correspondence was
published in full in Opportunity, April, 1936, pp. 126-27.

17.From "Journalistic
Headache," by R. E. Wolseley, already cited, I take the following: '
The sports editor of a small Midwestern daily learned this
unforgettably one Fall when he jokingly suggested that a good way to
stop Ozzie Simmons, the great Negro football star from Iowa, was to
roll a number of big juicy watermelons out on the field.... Telephone
calls, letters and personal visits from the Negroes of the city made
him realize he had hurt some feelings. A formal protest--a
petition--from the local Inter-Racial Council brought the matter to
the attention of the newspaper's managing editor."

19.A Negro historian, already
mentioned. He has published a number of valuable books on the history
of his people, and accumulated an enormous store of illustrative
material.

20.Walter D. Edmonds says in
American Notes and Queries, May, 1941, p.23, that "Zip Coon,
the blackface song, was being sung in 1834," but it apparently did
not lead to the application of coon to Negroes.

23.The colored composer of
"Under the Bamboo Tree," "Oh, Didn't He Ramble," "Lazy Moon," and
other songs of the 90's, and also of the Negro anthem, "Lift Every
voice and Sing." The words of some of his songs were written by his
brother, James Weldon Johnson (1871-1933), the best poet the race has
yet produced.

24.In South Africa the term is
sometimes used by the newspapers to designate a black native,
apparently without derogatory intent. The following is from
"Stilt-Walker of Serowe," by Norman Howell, Cape Times (Cape
Town), Aug. 22, 1936: "Why is stilt-walking a common thing among the
coons of the Cape?" In the Virgin Islands, formerly under the
Danish flag, the blacks are called goons or goonies. In
"Lazy Islands Come to Life," Baltimore Sunday Sun, March 22,
1942, Lawrence H. Baker suggested that the g may be "a
gutteralizing of the c in coon, arising out of the
Danes' attempts to pronounce the latter word."

32.Rice (1808-1860) was a
comedian, playwright and song-writer, and "Jim Crow" was only one of
his songs that became popular. He is not to be confused with Dan Rice
(1822-1900), an acrobat, circus clown and temperance orator.